iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Lake Huron! Live! @lake-huron.live · 8h

Current* conditions near Wasaga Beach, ON:

View looking SW over Wasaga Beach into the Georgian Bay. // Image captured at (local time): 2026-10-13 09:12:02 EDT (about 1 min. prior to this post) // Image sourced from: wasagabeach.com // Current Temp in Wasaga Beach: 61 F | 16 C // Precip: overcast clouds // Wind: SW at 5 mph | 7 kph // Humidity: 93%

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Dominique Baker @bakerdphd.bsky.social · 10h

"We should be asking ourselves: When is civility useful and when is it a canard for oppression? When is anger a detriment and when is it a righteous tool?" www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

insidehighered.com

What’s Wrong With Civility?

Civility can be a tool of engagement. But history has shown it can also be used to oppress the powerless.

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Dominique Baker @bakerdphd.bsky.social · 10h

"Discerning when civility is being used as a convenient mask for attacks against social progress requires our dedicated effort. But we owe it to our students and to ourselves to do whatever we can to pierce those pernicious veils." I continue to believe that discernment will be our superpower

Screenshot of article which reads: We should be asking ourselves: When is civility useful and when is it a canard for oppression? When is anger a detriment and when is it a righteous tool? Two hundred years ago, it would have been illegal in my home state of Virginia for me to learn to read in group settings. Practically, that meant that I, and any other Black person, could have been imprisoned and whipped for the grave act of learning to read while excessively melanated (though, as many scholars have shown, private citizens would have been the most likely group to deliver the punishment). It was not increased civility across American society that changed that discrimination. That would take a Civil War and Black Virginians pushing for an end to the prohibition.

Screenshot of article which reads: Audre Lorde once said, “I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman says, ‘Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.’ But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change?” Discerning when civility is being used as a convenient mask for attacks against social progress requires our dedicated effort. But we owe it to our students and to ourselves to do whatever we can to pierce those pernicious veils.

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Ellen Muehlberger @emuehlbe.bsky.social · 8h

Consigned so hard my pen scratches the table underneath

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

back in 2003, Toril Moi wrote a surprisingly generously-minded article for the Duke grad newsletter (!), i.e. directed at a specific grad cohort & institution, about the figure of the "theory boy," which has also always, for me, described the idiots of jacobin torilmoi.com/wp-content/u...

The situation I want to look at here is the graduate classroom, the kind of seminar that most of us in the humanities
engage in every week. (I shall discuss gender. But similar mechanisms can—and will—produce classrooms divided by race, sexuality or social class.) Every year some female graduate students
tell me that they feel overlooked, marginalized, silenced in
some seminars. They paint a picture of classrooms where the
alpha males—so-called “theory boys”—are encouraged to hold
forth in impossibly obscure language, but where their own
interventions elicit no response. These women, in short, say
that they are not listened to, that they are not taken seriously,
and that they get the impression that their perceptions of the
matter at hand are of no interest to anyone else.

Such experiences tend to reproduce a particularly clichéd
ideology in which theory and abstract thought are thought to
belong to men and masculinity, and women are imagined to be
the bearers of emotional, personal, practical concerns. In
a system that grants far more symbolic capital, far more intellectual power, to abstract theorizing than to, say, concrete investigations of particular cases, these women lose out in the battle
for symbolic capital. This is bad for their relationship to the
field they love, and it is bad for their careers in and out of graduate school. This is sexism, and all this goes to show that sexist
effects often arise from the interactions of people who have no
sexist intentions at all.

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J. L. Yocum @jlyocum.com · 12/10/2026

Oohhh, I like this term: “faked writing.” Thanks for introducing it (to me, at least). Call it what it is!

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Robert Wiśniewski @relicsclerics.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Warsaw Late Antique Seminar on 15 October: Mateusz Fafiński (Universität Erfurt), Governing the Ungovernable? Administering Church Patrimony in Late Antique Italy. In person and online.

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Ellen Muehlberger @emuehlbe.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

I thought my esteem could not be higher---I was wrong

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Ellen Muehlberger @emuehlbe.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

And that sense is just missing from faked writing "writing" generated to appeal to a generic audience is no kind of writing at all

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Ellen Muehlberger @emuehlbe.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

That is, you get a sense of audience--- real people who are gonna read this thing and engage with it, maybe cite it to argue with it, but maybe cite it to support their future work, but whatever happens, they're going to actually read it

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Ellen Muehlberger @emuehlbe.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

The journal I work for is sponsored by our subfield's disciplinary organization, and you don't have to be a member to publish in the journal, but it definitely helps If you've been to a couple of our annual meetings, you start to get a sense of what our readers want, what their questions are

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Ellen Muehlberger @emuehlbe.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

I suppose someone could direct an LLM to do exactly that--- to read through back issues of a specific journal and to "write" in its style--- but then, what are we even doing here? Big she doesn't even go here energy

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Ellen Muehlberger @emuehlbe.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

What you pick up when you do that may seem like just vibes, but it's actually pretty complex information: who reads this thing, who cares enough to write for it, what's the not quite visible shaping that peer review provides, what does this reading community care about? It's all in there

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Ellen Muehlberger @emuehlbe.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

The only way to be able to imagine that reader is to do a lot of reading in that journal--- the first thing I tell students who are interested in publishing somewhere is to read several back issues of the journal they are targeting cover to cover

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Ellen Muehlberger @emuehlbe.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Even more pronounced in writing produced for a journal--- journal readers are usually a relatively small but committed set of readers, and also writers themselves, so the community that a journal article is produced for has a very specific audience

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Ellen Muehlberger @emuehlbe.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

It's different than "writing" produced for the widest audience possible--- the entirety of stolen literature on which generative AI is built

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Ellen Muehlberger @emuehlbe.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

In something like a classroom, the instructor might be the reader, but also probably the other students are in mind, because the themes and shape of class discussions are also in there. So the writing that gets produced for a class has that community's stamp on it

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Ellen Muehlberger @emuehlbe.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

In every piece of writing, there are at least two people---the writer and the reader they are imagining Faked writing has a very weird sense of who that reader would be

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Ellen Muehlberger @emuehlbe.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

There are a lot of tells for faked writing---the anodyne register of it all, the sentence to sentence confusion---but the biggest one that I see is the lack of an audience the thing is supposedly "written" for

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S.J. Pearce @homophonous.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Every single American:

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Lake Michigan! Live! @lake-michigan.live · 11/10/2026

Current* conditions near Frankfort, MI:

Western view from Harbor Lights Resort in Frankfort of the Frankfort Lighthouse and breakwaters separating Frankfort Harbor from Lake Michigan. // Image captured at (local time): 2026-10-11 17:36:02 EDT (about 1 min. prior to this post) // Image sourced from: harborlightsresort.net // Current Temp in Frankfort: 66 F | 19 C // Precip: clear sky // Wind: N at 7 mph | 11 kph // Humidity: 77%

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Ellen Muehlberger @emuehlbe.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Tattoo on other leg, second layer of concrete, second set of planes

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Ellen Muehlberger @emuehlbe.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Corollary: if you are consistently repeating the story of inevitability, you're a pusher

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I can’t stress enough that this notion of if and when It will gain consciousness is Bible fanfic. It’s not real.

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Ellen Muehlberger @emuehlbe.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I want a tattoo, a 6 foot concrete sculpture, and a flag on one of those planes that circle the stadium, all of them saying: AI isn't inevitable, and narrating it as inevitable is a choice that erases agency all around---conveniently for its pushers, disastrously for anyone who questions

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Ellen Muehlberger @emuehlbe.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I wear it so much I might need a second

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Isle McElroy @islemcelroy.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I start teaching at the Columbia mfa today. Here’s the AI statement from my syllabus. Feel free to borrow.

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Lake Ontario! Live! @lake-ontario.live · 08/10/2026

Current* conditions near Toronto, ON:

NE view from YTZ on the Toronto Islands facing downtown Toronto and the shores of Lake Ontario. // Image captured at (local time): 2026-10-07 20:00:02 EDT (about 1 min. prior to this post) // Image sourced from: skylinewebcams.com // Current Temp in Toronto: 71 F | 21 C // Precip: scattered clouds // Wind: WNW at 16 mph | 26 kph // Humidity: 57%

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Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

we do not have to live this way.

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Rebecca Tushnet @rtushnet.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

“UChicago’s national ranking for selectivity, currently No. 4, depends crucially on its rejecting so many women. Its selectivity of men alone would drop it out of the top 10. By contrast, Chicago’s selectivity for women alone would place it in the first position in the country.”

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

There’s no A.I. “literacy”. There is only power, to either rebuild or eradicate commonly shared knowledge production. They haz it. Remains to be seen if we haz some too.

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Lake Ontario! Live! @lake-ontario.live · 06/10/2026

Current* conditions near Toronto, ON:

SW view from Billy Bishop Airport CYTZ on the Toronto shoreline of Lake Ontario. // Image captured at (local time): 2026-10-06 17:53:49 EDT (about 7 min. prior to this post) // Image sourced from: navcanada.ca // Current Temp in Toronto: 59 F | 15 C // Precip: scattered clouds // Wind: SSW at 8 mph | 13 kph // Humidity: 51%

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Lake Ontario! Live! @lake-ontario.live · 05/10/2026

Current* conditions near Youngstown, NY:

NW view of Fort Niagara in the foreground and Lake Ontario at the mouth of the Niagra River in the distance. // Image captured at (local time): 2026-10-04 19:30:14 EDT (about 1 min. prior to this post) // Image sourced from: youtube.com/@Niagarafallslive // Current Temp in Youngstown: 63 F | 17 C // Precip: scattered clouds // Wind: SW at 10 mph | 17 kph // Humidity: 72%

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Lake Huron! Live! @lake-huron.live · 04/10/2026

Current* conditions near Sarnia, ON:

NW view near the mouth of the St Clair River where it meets Lake Huron. // Image captured at (local time): 2026-10-04 08:27:10 EDT (about 15 min. prior to this post) // Image sourced from: e-navigation.canada.ca // Current Temp in Sarnia: 49 F | 9 C // Precip: light rain // Wind: SSE at 7 mph | 11 kph // Humidity: 95%

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Todd Moye @moye.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Estelle Freedman devised an incredibly clever dh method to find and examine examples of women talking about the phenomenon in oral history interviews before the term was widely used. oralhistoryreview.org/ohr-authors/...

oralhistoryreview.org

Author Interview: Estelle B. Freedman on Oral Histories and Sexual Violence

In OHR’s spring 2023 issue,scholar Estelle B. Freedman shares her findings from a macro-level analysis of oral history databases in order to analyze women’s memories and responses to se…

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Jacqueline Antonovich @jackiantonovich.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

In 1974, Cornell lecturer Lin Farley began recognizing a pattern in the experiences women shared in her Women and Work course: women were being pushed out of jobs by men’s sexual behavior. Farley coined the term, “sexual harassment.”

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Lake Superior! Live! @lake-superior.live · 03/10/2026

Current* conditions near Isle Royale NP, MI:

NE view from Greenstone Ridge in (1,133 ft above sea level) Isle Royale National Park. // Image captured at (local time): 2026-10-03 07:11:58 EDT (about 7 min. prior to this post) // Image sourced from: nps.gov/isro/learn/photosmultimedia/webcams.htm // Current Temp in Isle Royale NP: 41 F | 5 C // Precip: broken clouds // Wind: SSW at 9 mph | 14 kph // Humidity: 93%

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Ellen Muehlberger @emuehlbe.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Resurrected my street's book club, which had faded out just before the pandemic---we met last night and started with The Hounding, which is *great*

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Alison Gopnik @alisongopnik.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

This is an excellent article by Leif Wetherby - why AI is a cultural technology not a collection of human-like agents (citing our work on this). And why the anthropomorphism is a distraction from the very real risks and dangers and the way to deal with them. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/01/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | Stop Talking About A.I. Like a Human (Gift Article)

If we want to figure out the proper way to control A.I. models, we need to recognize what they really are.

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Cynthia Miller-Idriss @milleridriss.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I have reviewed thousands of grad school applications over my career & always advocated against looking at overall undergrad GPA & instead at the trajectory in the last two years. That’s because I saw a pattern on so many women’s transcripts as they experienced something in their first year 1/

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Lake Huron! Live! @lake-huron.live · 01/10/2026

Current* conditions near St. Ignace, MI:

Southern view from a dock in Lake Huron near the Administration building of the Mackinac Bridge traversing the Straits of Mackinac. // Image captured at (local time): 2026-10-01 18:42:02 EDT (about 1 min. prior to this post) // Image sourced from: mackinacbridge.org // Current Temp in St. Ignace: 61 F | 16 C // Precip: overcast clouds // Wind: NNW at 7 mph | 11 kph // Humidity: 81%

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